2) Association vs. Event Company
Does it matter who's hosting? Depending on your goals it might so it's important to assess whether the event is hosted by an association or event management company. What's the difference? When an event is association-hosted, you’ll need to factor in additional costs such as dues (annual or monthly) or higher non-member pricing, if that option is even offered. From a networking perspective, when an event is association-hosted and closed to the transient traffic of an open registration model, you may find breaking into established networking circles difficult. Whereas at an event that is open to the general public networking is easier because the audience has been conditioned to see new faces at each event.
The tradeoff is that with associations, your dues should earn you much more than event access but year-long benefits such as continuing education and additional networking and marketing opportunities that aren’t provided by the event-only organizations.

​3) Interview the Organizer
We encourage you to take a moment to 'interview' the organizer. You're investing hundreds or thousands of dollars and your time, not to mention your time away from the office and home so any reasonable organization should happily field a few questions about their event. 

• What's unique about the event? Why should you go to this one over that one?
• How do registration and attendance numbers compare over the last three years? Even better, who are they?
• Are speaking engagements available? Do you have the chance to increase the value of your investment with guaranteed facetime? 
• What are their organized networking events? What opportunities are there to host your own events?

Five Tips in Five Seconds:

1. If you take a second person, mix it up and take different associates to show your firm has depth and breadth; plus, you can use the opportunity to assess team members who may have a knack for marketing. 
2. Always use the conference mobile apps because attendee lists are moving there—it’s you’re easiest, best way to see who else is going. 
3. Stop thinking that the week 3,000 of your closest competitors are in town is the best time to secure (and keep) a client visit. 
4. Don’t sponsor before you’ve attended an event. 
5. Do go to everything and always make a lap through the lobby bar before bed. 

Keep in mind a lot of what makes or breaks your conference success is planning. It's essential you plan suitable before, during, and after activities.  Prior to the event, think about a targeted communications plan, include both mass and direct outreach, inform your social media networks, post on your website, update your signature line, and send emails or personal messages. Be sure to promote your participation during the event and consider hosting or co-hosting a memorable experience for clients and prospects. Last but not least, don't forget the follow-up. Don't lose the momentum of the event or the energy we gain from making meaningful personal connections. Reach out, stay relevant and keep developing those relationships within your entire network, from prospects to vendors, and make your interactions count.

When defining your voice, especially with social media platforms, use the following segments as a guide:

1. What qualities or traits do you want synonymous with your brand? Are you friendly, logical, meticulous, witty, warm, professional?
2. Choose your style of expression. It’s okay if this varies a bit depending on whether you're posting on Facebook or LinkedIn as long as you are consistent on that platform. Are you personal, honest, direct, technical, straightforward?
3. Decide the manner in which you speak. Are you serious, simple, complex, fun, full of industry terms and acronyms?
4. Set the intention or goal of the conversation. Do you want to educate, sell, inform, engage?

Now what to post is a whole other e-book but an easy place to start is to coordinate messaging with emails and events. Work on building your audience, add social buttons to your email signatures. Encourage employees, colleagues, and clients to follow and share your content. And mix your content up. No one wants to watch a constant commercial. Aim for 50% curated (shares from industry or other business leaders), 30% original (your blog posts or legal updates) and 20% promotional (watch our webinar, stop by our booth).  
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Social media is meant to be just that: social. It is ideally a place for two-way conversations with your followers. Our number one recommendation is to be human with your posts and interactions. If you are true to your brand’s personality, and consistent, it will resonate and build brand loyalty you cannot buy. 

The merits of having a newsletter aside, we’re going to dive into what makes a good newsletter. Let’s start with frequency. You need to look at a few factors to determine frequency. Does your firm’s footprint cover states that generate enough legal content that is worthy of landing in your clients’ inboxes? Some of you may have one state that generates an out-sized amount of content and in that case you should be wary of leaning too heavily on that. Remember, your newsletter has two purposes: to inform your clients and market your business. If you rely too heavily on content from just one state where you operate then you run the risk of only reminding clients that you operate in that single state. So answer that question with careful consideration.

Secondly, what kind of frequency can you commit to as the author and producer of your newsletter—or are you willing to pay to outsource the work? Frequency can be a trap—remember our previous post, “Name that Newsletter”? Well in it we talk about naming your newsletter and the path of least resistance creatively can sometimes be the LAW FIRM MONTHLY NEWSLETTER. Good news—you named it; bad news—you committed to monthly releases.

Here’s where we’re going: content should drive frequency; not the other way around. One of our best practices to aim for is a loose, quarterly release (that’s about as often as clients want them), supplemented by “breaking” or “urgent” releases when big developments occur.

With our law firm clients, we advise having a blog on the website where all of this content lives (it’s phenomenal for your SEO, too) and when you’ve collected enough organic content on the blog, then we batch and send a newsletter to the clients. This strategy removes the pressure of sending it on pre-committed dates and stops you from searching frantically for content to fill the real estate in your newsletter.

Building the actual newsletter
We are big proponents of MailChimp. We use a variety of e-marketing systems for our clients, but when we have the choice, it’s MailChimp all the way. It’s priced by the number of contacts so you’re never overpaying and it handles all of the unsubscribe, legal footers, etc. to keep your mailings compliant. You can even do print mailings via MailChimp now and landing pages which are good for specific purposes but not really worth diving into when discussing a newsletter. Now here are five tips to help you build-out a fantastic newsletter:

Step One:
​Don’t put the full post in the newsletter. It’s a buffet, after all. If they want more, they’ll click to get it. Plus it keeps your newsletter down to short, readable bursts of text and won’t overwhelm your reader with too much content.

Step Two:
Purposefully vary the content. Balance the content between your various markets (states in the cases of law firms) and practice areas. This is where the marketing comes in. If you do this, you’ll subtly remind clients that use you for one service that you also provide other legal services they need. You’re doing the same by providing legal analysis for the same practice but different content for different states.

Step Three:
Throw back to your own, good stuff. We like to include a “recent” section or “update” section. Case law develops and often you’ll find yourself updating clients on a case or decision. So don’t be afraid to go back and update things you’ve already done. One, it’s easy. Two, it’s important to clients.

Step Four:
Watch your analytics. Check your open rates, click rates, and unsubscribes. For the first few runs of your newsletter, change up the day and time that you send. Keep in mind that time zones mean that your 11:00AM east coast distribution may sound perfect but that hits your west coast clients right at 8:00AM along with other critical, top-of-day emails. You can schedule them out to hit all time zones at the same time (say 11:00AM) but the point is you should play with it to get the optimum day and time for your list. Limit your play time to Monday, Wednesday, Friday before 4:30PM and avoiding lunches. Otherwise, take a few shots before settling on a specific day and time.

Step Five:
Keep it on brand. Choose fonts, colors, and a name that resonates with your core brand. Also watch the tone—these aren’t proprietary documents and they’re not designed for the court. So the tone should be informative, but casual. If it’s too “lawyery” they might not feel inclined to pick up the phone and ask questions. Or it may come off as too dense to read, thus defeating the entire purpose. So lighten it up and always leave it open-ended so they’ll click more, read more, and engage more.

Final Note:
Don’t worry about posting the full contents of your newsletter articles separately on your blog. Do it, and do it boldly. One step further: never require a login. Let us leave with you with a reality check: clients will not log in for the content. No one is going to steal the content. And, your website needs all the organic, fresh content you can give it to keep your search results up and to be seen as a legitimate source not only for Google, but for anyone else who lands on your website.

Want to discuss how we can build a newsletter as part of a comprehensive MarComm strategy for your law firm? Connect with us today by clicking right here.

Green is actually the color the human eye can recognize more shades of than any other color. Think evolution over millennia as we hunted and gathered, trying to discern the poisonous from nutritious. After black and white, the color that was most commonly named first by most human societies was red. The last primary color to be given a name? Blue. It’s called the Hierarchy of Color. Check the whole read out here, it’s quite fascinating. 

So if we can see more greens and bothered to give red a name second in human history, why aren’t we using more colors in brand-building and breaking out of the blue box we’ve built? Lots of reasons. Old design rules. Inertia. Stubborn clients determined to have a blue logo.

​The point is, you can use different colors and should use different colors. You should use colors that evoke an emotion for you first. From there, you’ll build messaging, images, and other collaterals that will communicate that passion with your clients and broaden that connection. Right now, not choosing blue could significantly differentiate your brand from competitors (in a line-up likely half would be blue tones, I’d be willing to bet). We’ve worked in blues a lot and still do with some clients. We’ve also had the pleasure of building brands that include a wide range of other color schemes:
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• Lime green and gray. This was a law firm, God bless them. It was a bold choice with brilliant results. 
• A blue/teal/green gradient. This brand in particular has more photo and collateral options than anyone else, really, because it’s such a fresh color scheme young designers and photographers want to work with.
• A red/orange gradient. When paired with gray, it had a million-dollar result that gave a glossy, corporate look. 
• A pure, bright red. This one is cloud-clean and ultra-modern. The results are a stunning, tech-driven look that feels very Silicon Valley. 

With most of these you are playing with a fuller color scheme, of course. In cases using one really bright, unexpected color, it’s muted with grays (the lime green and red/orange gradients). The blue/teal/green works exceptionally well over stark, bright whites, helping to minimize and frame the impact of their brand elements. In the case of the pure, bright red, we actually paired it with a very light teal to further modernize it and use a color commonly found in the technology/social spaces. Because it works so well on white, it needed a second accent color to expand the scope and range of what could be done. 

Even with our clients who have existing brands already built and established in blue, there’s a lot a new designer can bring to your brand. With one client they had a beautiful brand that was already established and well-known and of course, it was a deep, buttoned-up navy blue. The brand they had was already on point for who they were—very professional, white glove service, and well-known for being leaders in their fields; there wasn’t much that needed to be changed so we focused our efforts on the extensions. We added a bright orange color and lively, scripted font that would tag on to the logo when necessary for publications, events, programs, and other offerings. It was purposefully more casual and human in order to soften the core brand. It works beautifully in hitting the intended mark of updating the brand while maintaining the incredibly strong and recognizable core they’d established over the years. 

The work you can do with color is limitless. As you consider your design and marketing choices in the future, think outside the blues. ​

Or in the legal space, consider the blog. Or blawg, as they're known. The ABA Journal publishes a list called the Blawg 100 Hall of Fame. (check them out here). One thing you'll notice about some of the best blawgs is that they're sophisticated extensions of the authoring firm's core brand identities but notably more casual. Why? Because if you're looking at Ballard Spahr's Consumer Finance Monitor or Stenson Leonard Street's Arbitration Nation, it's because you're either already aware of the core brand (and their subject-matter expertise) and you're into the more direct, content-driven blawg; or, their SEO efforts are killing it and you're introduced first to this way cooler (and friendlier) version of their brands. The concept works magically both ways, regardless of where the traffic begins and it allows them to do two things: attract the folks who want the buttoned-up, old school experience and gets the children excited because hey, these folks get it. 

Want to push your brand identity a bit (or a bunch) beyond its dusty old shelf?
Give us a call or connect with us here. We'll take a look and happily walk you through some ideas.